Warwick Gardens – the diversity of a Peckham park

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It’s taken 6 years, 1000s upon 1000s of photos, I’ve gone through 2 lenses, and been on the most enjoyable learning curve for this…. my new book. Meet the tiny residents of Warwick Gardens… all 555 of them!

Warwick Gardens is an ordinary park in Peckham, south east London. It’s not a nature reserve and has nothing special to warrant it as such. But, after 6 years of photographing the insects, I have unearthed some delights: regional rarities, species new to the country, and some astounding-looking insects, whether it be jewel wasps, camouflaged weevils, or thick-headed flies.

Peckham is being tidied up, revamped and rebranded. This book is a portrait of the insects who live in Warwick Gardens, a story of life in the bushes. Written with a wry look at the gentrification of Peckham through the compound eyes of our tiny neighbours, it reveals the comings and goings, the politics, the celebrations of birth, death and survival.

In my porch, a leafcutter bee has decided to build her nest in a damp-proofing hole in the wall. First, she had to excavate the mess left by a previous tenant – a spider – by pulling out all the debris.

Leafcutter bee excavating and old spider nest

It’s early morning, and our bee has resumed her chamber-making duties. Her distant cousins, the ants, are running around eager to help. They are hoping for some pollen scraps. But it seems a password is needed to enter the nest – if you’re not on the list you’re not coming in. Luckily, our bee knows the secret code.

The ants have joined in

She starts to line the cavity with leaves, cut to size and usually harvested from a rose bush, carrying the leaf plugs to the nest between her mandibles. These are plastered to the walls with saliva, creating a cosy chamber. During the day she collects pollen, stored on the hairs of her underbelly. She likes ‘flat’ flowers like daisies, so she can wiggle her abdomen over the stamens to collect the dust. The pollen is stored in the chamber for the bee larvae to feed on once hatched. Then she will lay an egg and seal up the chamber, creating a bijou home for one of her young.

The first leaves are brought in

Once the first cell has been sealed up, she starts the whole process again. Depending on how long the cavity is, leafcutter bees will make enough chambers to fit. She could probably fit four chambers in a damp-proofing hole. Female eggs will be laid first, the male eggs last.

The nest building has begun

Closing the nest up can be a tough job. It gets harder to fly in with a leaf, and the pesky ants are still in the way. Discarded leaves litter the ground below, unsuccessful attempts at negotiating a way to shove a leaf into a nearly full hole. Sealing the nest takes time and a lot of leaves and saliva to make it watertight and safe from predators. The young bees will emerge in spring, the males flying out first followed by the females.

‘Tis the season to be merry. The office parties are in full-swing, tinsel and baubles adorn all the shops, and there is a general panic in the air over what presents to waste your money on for those relatives you only see once a year. On the telly its all happy families enjoying Christmas in soft focus, surrounded by so much food you could feed a continent. Most of the insects of Warwick Gardens have the right idea – they have gone into hibernation.

Yellow dung fly

Over in Poo Corner the dung flies are having their Christmas parties. Looking rather dashing in their yellow fluffy attire they really standout against the dark brown satin sheen of newly laid dog turds. These steaming castles of poo are the place to gather in numbers to meet other like-minded flies, perhaps find someone to mate with, and to generally hang out and get drunk on the blood of tiny insects.

Not for them lurking with mosquitos in a sweaty corner at a gig in the Bussey Building, or vomiting up stale beer with the bluebottles at the back of Bar Story, nor a lively evening with the house flies flitting around the lights above the pool tables at Canavans. No, these guys really love a shit party and there are shit parties popping-up all over the park.

It is the middle of August and ever since the vote to leave the park there has been a quietness… not much is happening and many residents have decided to go some place else where they feel welcome. The social wasps are out and about, attracted by the ripening fruit in the orchard. But there is a wariness in the air as an article has to be invoked and everyone is waiting to see what happens next. Queen Vespula Vulgaris has started her nest in a loft in Lyndhurst Grove and already built up an impressive entourage of loyal workers. She is an incidental queen, put into power because her predecessor chose to fly off when the going got tough, having made a pigs ear out of the silly referendum. This new queen enjoys making life uncomfortable for insects: cracking down on the rights of free buzzing, a stiff policy on non-native species allowed in the park, and stinging anyone who isn’t a well-paid pollinator. She is snappily dressed, all yellow and black stripes, with a formidable weapon in her tail which she has already admitted she will use if threatened. She rules over a nest of conservative identikit workers who tend to her every need, except one who is a bit wayward, rather rude and untidy with no sense of tact who has insulted many insects in the park. For some bizarre reason he has been given the job of representing the nest.

Vespula vulgaris and Vespula germanica

On the other side of the park are the industrious German wasps. Though not big on presentation their nests are impressively constructed by a studious workforce, having honed their skills in engineering which are the envy of the hymenoptera world. Queen Vespula Germanica rules her realm in a somewhat christian and democratic way, often dealing with skirmishes that break out between neighbouring nests in her role as a de facto leader of a union which has grown so large no one quite knows who’s in charge. Identified by a 3-dot Merkel-Raute stamped on their faces, the workers are not best pleased with their queen and her ratings have plummeted. She will soon be up for election.

In the near future our queens will have to meet to discuss the Vulgar wasps leaving the park. The German wasps are understandably buzzed off as their dream of the union is beginning to fall apart. They will have to negotiate who has the rights to harvest the juice from the plums and pears, with access to the common orchard being the biggest concern, and who will have buzzing rights over annoying the humans at their picnics. There are worries about the open border policy, fearing swarms of hornets, forceably smoked out of Dulwich Park by the council a couple of years ago, could be given free access to Warwick Gardens. If it doesn’t go well the Vulgar wasps may be cast out, left with making a go of it alone with only the blackberries to trade with. What a mess.

Its the middle of July and Warwick Gardens is looking a bit worse for wear, reflecting the vibe of the country after voting to leave the EU. The foxes have flattened the foliage; the bindweed, with their delicate white trumpet flowers a foil for the hidden intentions of domination, has spread insidiously over the nettles and brambles suppressing any hope of freedom of growth; and the daisies are looking a bit weary with having to regrow after being constantly mowed down. The yarrow, hoping to host their annual festival of pollen and nectar, have popped up in an empty venue.

Red capsid bug creeping around

Last year this place was buzzing. It was noisy and full of life – a showcase of the sheer diversity of invertebrates in the park. But it seems that this year is one festival too many; the insects are preferring a more boutique ‘meadow-style’ festival offering a mélange of flowers and a more discerning flavour of nectar, sown especially to add colour and variety to bland parks. Everything is really quiet. The Roesel’s bush-crickets, normally hired to chirrup up business, chose to leave the park believing it was overrun with migrant species, a cynical lie perpetrated by unscrupulous anti-orthopterists; and the remaining grasshoppers have gone on strike, aghast that the crickets were lied to. The flies, patriotic and always up for a fight, are flitting around making nuisance for the non-natives. A few red capsid bugs are creeping around, anxious not to be mistaken for a Pokémon Go character, but all the while wishing that they could be found and appreciated as a real living thing. Even the mirid bugs got bored waiting for the party to start and just buggered off. And the weather hasn’t helped. A dull wet spring and cool temperatures have exacerbated and confused many residents about when and where to start a family. Its like nobody cares, exhausted at the changes around them.

The mottled shield bugs have had their lilac habitat ripped away by someone ‘wanting a better view of the park’, and having arrived in Peckham only a few years ago feel rather rejected. The hawthorn shield bugs, with their brightly coloured coats of majesty, have had their ancestral home savaged by cuts, the lower branches lopped off to make it cheaper to maintain. And the parent bugs and birch catkin bugs got ousted from their favourite independent tree in the multi-species part of the park, chopped down by someone ‘wanting more light in their garden’. They had to relocate to the big corporate birch trees on the other side of the park. Unfortunately it seems they didn’t ‘fit in’ as they have disappeared, leaving the planthoppers with no one to play with. Or, as this is the main constituency of the rather moderate birch shield bug, maybe the birch catkin bugs, with their left-wing ideals about ‘rights to live on the same tree – we share the same host plant’, were viewed as a threat to the stability of the community, fuelled by pedantic catkin politics, forcing a campaign to stop them taking over.

Common green shield bug nymph – the only shield bug in the park

At least the green shield bugs, the hard-working bugs of the park with no obvious affiliation to any plant, are holding on. Those green shield bugs who everyone knows so well that they are prefixed with ‘common’ and generally taken for granted by the conservationists. The bugs who spend their days dutifully sap-supping, impervious to the strange weather we are having, almost neglected until someone prods them too far and they revert to their chav name of ‘stink’bug’. How long before they realise they are the only prey for the bigger enemy – the solitary wasps with a taste for shield bug nymphs on the hunt to stock their nests with the fattest, juiciest specimens to feed their offspring.

If ever there was a character that represents old Peckham it has to be the stag beetle. A proper south London geezer, dressed up to the nines in a sharp, shiny suit tinged with purple, brandishing a fine set of red antlers held aloft with pride and demanding respect as Britain’s largest beetle. With an ancestry going back to when the Great North Wood covered the area, he favours the old haunts in Peckham – those dusty, rotting log piles hidden at the end of gardens owned by people who have lived here for years and understand how the neighbourhood works. The trend for tidy gardens with paving, minimal planting and a complete lack of soul which are currently monopolising our streets are utterly useless to him. The stag beetle needs the perfect nursery – piles of old logs where their grubs can chew rotten wood to their hearts content and grow fat without being disturbed for the next few years until they are ready to morph into adults.

Like any dandy the stag beetle is almost hopelessly unfit to do anything other than hang around looking cool. Cumbersome in flight they look faintly ridiculous flying around, antlers waving, on a warm spring dusky evening, trying their absolute best to find a lady to flirt with. On a night out with the boys they can get into fights where a test of strength with their antlers will win the day. Unfortunately all that bravado can’t stave off fatal attacks by wide-boy corvids, hipster cats or under the feet of humans who have no respect for anything other than themselves.

Walking through Warwick Gardens the other week I noticed something amiss. It took a while to realise that the silver birch tree which trailed its beautiful leafy branches over the fence in the Football Quarter had been chopped down. In its place was a view of the house which had previously had been obscured. My heart sank as this was the tree where I first discovered Orientus ishidae, the leafhopper which caused so much excitement in the bug world and subsequently put Warwick Gardens on the entomological map. But why? After talking with the homeowner whose garden the tree was in, she explained that she “wanted more light in my garden”. She asked if it was a problem as she had spoken to the council who had given her permission to cut it down. Well what could I say? Its not my tree, or even my park, and the tree was growing in her garden… BUT it was the possible host plant for a rare insect, as well as a family home to birch catkin bugs, birch shield bugs, mottled shield bugs, parent bugs and southern oak bush-crickets. It’s a real habitat loss and I am deeply saddened, but it is also a lesson about education. After our conversation the homeowner said that if she had known about the insects living there she would have just pruned the tree.

Orientus ishidae nymphs on ivy – time will tell if they will be back this year

Orientus ishidae has been spreading through the UK and its host plant has yet to be established. In Cambridge one was found on wisteria, in hopping distance of echinops, honeysuckle, cotoneaster, lavender. I have been finding our nymphs living on the ivy which grows adjacent to birch tree, and every year I see them expanding – last year we had a record 10 nymphs. Now I will have to wait until August before I know whether they are breeding on the ivy or just hopping over from the birch tree to bask in the sun. If it is the latter I fear the loss of a very beautiful insect in our park. Only time will tell.